


(the wheeling stars chimed in their courses)

by lalaietha



Category: Clash of the Titans (2010)
Genre: Other, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-07
Updated: 2010-04-07
Packaged: 2017-10-08 18:24:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/78278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/lalaietha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Io wakes to the scent of the apple-tree, and to find a bloom and a peacock's feather by the bed she shares with Perseus, where he lies sleeping still. There was a time these things would make her heart skip in the anticipation of joy, and the knowledge of love: now, the skip remains, but it is fear that causes it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(the wheeling stars chimed in their courses)

**Author's Note:**

> Set after the movie. I have connected movie!Io and myth!Io's stories where they can be harmonized.

When she found herself on earth again, it was beside the toppled statue of Zeus, and Perseus was there, dressed once again as a fisherman. Perseus was there, and so was the god who sired him: Zeus said something, but the wind kept it from her ears. Io was gratified, though, at Perseus' look of annoyance, directed at the place where his sire was no longer.

He crossed to her, and she stepped down off the higher rocks to him. And Perseus, who was never a fool, said, "He was the god you refused, wasn't he."

She might have said, _I tried to_, and that might have been true in some sense: but not in the important one, which was that so far as the choice had ever been hers, she had made it, and refused him. "Yes," she said.

"You don't have to come with me," Perseus told her, then, and this was the thing in him she loved so well.

Io smiled and said, "I know. I don't have to do anything." She reached out her hands to take his. "If you teach me how to mend nets, I might teach you how to fight in the dark."

Perseus smiled back, and said, "Deal."

And Poseidon's sea was blue, deep blue, when they walked down the cliffs to meet it.

*****

And now it is night, and the ocean is calm, and the waves rock their boat under the moon, the boat still new enough that it smells of cut boards and cured wood, tar and paint, instead of salt and fish and the other smells of life and work and time.

Io wakes to the scent of the apple-tree, and to find a bloom and a peacock's feather by the bed she shares with Perseus, where he lies sleeping still. There was a time these things would make her heart skip in the anticipation of joy, and the knowledge of love: now, the skip remains, but it is fear that causes it.

It doesn't take care not to wake Perseus. After the work of a day, he sleeps the sleep of the blissfully innocent, of a man who has seldom know great fear, or much in the way of betrayal. Io slips out from beneath the blankets and thrown fur that covers them together, wrapping a cloak around herself as she stands and looks for the one who was once her goddess.

Hera sits at the prow, on a chest that holds the few beautiful things Io kept and treasured over the years, or that Perseus has found her since. And the Queen of Heaven makes even such a rude seat a throne, and throws back the light of the stars gently redoubled. In the moonlight and starlight, nearly all colour is leeched: the scarlet of the goddess' gown turns to black, and her skin is unearthly in its whiteness against the dark of her hair; the gold at wrists and throat, depending from her ears and woven in her hair, is only a gleam in the dark.

Io stands before the one she once served, in rough-spun cloth, her skin browned now in the sun, her hair loose and a simple cloak around her shoulders, and she says, "Don't do this."

It might be a warning; it might be a prayer. She is a priestess cast away, and she shares this ship and her life with Zeus' bastard son, and she is afraid.

The Queen of Heaven looks away from the moon and stars, and her eyes light on Io's face. "Do not presume to know why I am here, Io," and if the words are a rebuke, they are gentler than Io has heard from this goddess in many, many years.

"You have come to my home," Io replies, "that I share with the living sign of the transgressions you so hate. What else could I assume?"

Hera's eyes stray to the lower part of the boat, where Perseus still sleeps. Io nearly steps between, to break that gaze - but Hera's face, though it holds bitterness, shows no anger. "Even I am not without gratitude," the Queen of Heaven replies, in a distant way. "And, as a woman I loved once said, though there might be more pain, it is only more of the same."

"You heard," Io says, and for a moment there is a flash of something in her once-goddess' eyes that frightens her, so that she wraps her cloak more closely around herself.

"How quickly you forget me." And for a moment the chest that is now a throne is a throne of an angry queen, and Io fights old habits that would have her beg forgiveness. "My husband may think he rules alone," she says, "and that he alone created you, and that all the world is his. Mankind may think so, too, and their poets write it - but they are wrong, little Io, and you know better than that. Olympus is mine, as much as it is Zeus'. Olympus and all the world besides. Of course I heard."

"If I forget," Io makes herself say, near to through her teeth, "it is maybe because I was forgotten."

Hera regards her in silence, the wide, deep, soft eyes of her epithet as impenetrable as they always were, and as easy to fall into. Then her gaze turns once again to Perseus, sleeping unaware and unafraid on the deck of the boat Io helped him build.

"Perseus told his father that he did not understand humanity - what it was to be human. What it is." Hera's voice is meditative, as if she pondered the creation of time, not her husband's bastard seed. "He may be right. And we may all of us be guilty of that. But if it is so, it is because we made you unlike ourselves, in those ways we do not understand. Maybe it is because we made you out of the earth; I do not know, in truth.

"We are different from you, Io," she says, and now there is a sadness in her voice. "You . . . change. You forget, and shift, and become different things. You forget old loves, and gather new ones, and you may do and be a hundred different things in one little span of life, and suffer nothing for it. It is a strange gift, and sometimes I envy it."

Io says nothing. Can think of nothing to say.

"We are not like you," the Queen of Heaven goes on. "We are what we are, and to change us is like moving the foundations of the earth. I have loved my husband since he was my little brother, and cut me from our father's stomach, and I will love him until time ends, and Kaos once again devours the world into night. I cannot do otherwise. And he is fickle, fickle and always false, and around my throne his bastards sit in eminence over my children, and still I cannot hate him. Cannot do anything but love him as helplessly as ever I have."

Io cannot see Hera, who was once her goddess true, because her eyes have blurred with tears that are of pain, and rage, and something else she cannot name. And she says, as she has always longed to say, "I deserved _nothing_ of what you did to me - not you, nor him, and I never did anything, _anything_ but serve you and love you as best I could do. His crimes were _not mine_."

Again she is caught by the fathomless eyes - and starts, heart in her throat, when she feels hands on her shoulders. It is Perseus, she sees when she half turns - of course it is Perseus, and she wonders now when he woke.

Perseus, who has killed Medusa and the kraken, and sent the dark god back beneath the earth, looks at Hera and asks, "Why are you here?" and there is wariness in his voice.

Hera's smile is gentle, and that is frightening. It is gentle, and it is sad, and it holds the bitterness of a goddess, but with the edges turned. It is Io of whom she asks, "What is my dominion, little Io?" and Io hates her for the affection in the naming.

"You are the Queen of Heaven," she answers, still, and Hera stands.

"Yes," she says, and she is tall and terrible and beautiful, and Perseus does not move from where he stands at Io's back. "I am. But of who else am I matron, Io? You know this answer."

But it is Perseus who says, "Marriage, and married women," because Io is too torn by now, too fraught and burned and stupid in her anger and loss.

"Indeed," Hera says, deep-eyed Hera, and Io nearly flinches when the Queen of Heaven steps forward and takes Io's face in her hands.

But Hera only kisses her, as a mother might kiss a daughter: once between her brows, once on each cheek, and lightly on her mouth. "My blessing, little Io," she says. "Whatever it may be worth to you, it will follow you and guard you, and it is no little thing."

And while Io stares at her, speech a thing she cannot find, the Queen of the Gods looks at Perseus behind her and says, in a voice that is more touched by warning, "Be unlike your father, Perseus."

"I plan to be exactly like my father," Perseus rejoins, flat and defiant, "because he took his love and his faith kept to my mother with him into death. And he loved me, and my sister, as if we were the same blood."

Hera laughs: she throws her head back and laughs, and it is a sound of triumph Io doesn't want to understand. And Hera makes a sign of benediction over the head of the bastard her husband sired, and who saved Olympus from the god of Hell, and says, "That is well, then, kraken-slayer. Be like him. Be very like him, and you, too, will carry my blessing. Whether you want it, or not."

And then she is gone, like the ghost of a star before it shines; Io can only take one deep, shaking breath.

"Are you all right?" Perseus murmurs in her ear. It some thought for her to answer, and to find an answer that isn't a lie.

"I will be," she says, at last, because it is true and because she will make it true. She half-turns toward him and says, "But we should go back to sleep."

It is warm, with him, underneath the cover and beneath the starlight. And she is cursed, and may not age - but he is half a god, and may not die.

She will be all right.

They will be all right.


End file.
